Harvesting the daily flow of consciousness, or what group therapy has to do with marine life.

Despite our proudest cultural and medical advances, mental illness remains largely taboo, partly because the experience of it can be so challenging to articulate. But when performance artist Bobby Baker was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in 1996, followed by a breast cancer diagnosis, she set out to capture her experience and her journey to recovery in 711 drawings that would serve as her private catharsis over the course of more than a decade. In Diary Drawings: Mental Illness and Me, Baker makes, at long last, this private experience public through 158 drawings and watercolors — poignant, honest, funny, moving, shocking — spanning 11 years of mental, physical, and emotional healing, a journey Marina Warner aptly calls in the preface a “chronicle of a life repaired.” The book is at once a personal journal and a tenacious thesaurus that helps translate the misunderstood realities of mental illness into an expressive and intuitive visual language the rest of the world can understand, reminiscent of the wonderful Drawing Autism.

I think mental illness is the worst of anything. The hierarchy of suffering is sort of bound into our society. But my personal experience is that the isolation and anguish of severe mental illness was much worse than…having something physical that people could understand better.” ~ Bobby Baker

From how the tears flow into her ears when she does yoga (Day 320) to the weight gain side effects of medication (Day 397) to the uplifting “butterflies of academia” (Day 579) to the strain of chemo (Day 698), Baker’s illustrated micro-narratives are startlingly raw, yet incredibly eloquent and layered.

Day 303

Day 320

Day 397

Day 470

Day 526

Day 579

Day 690

Day 698

The sequence of the drawings follows the artist’s painful but, ultimately, triumphant recovery, with the last stretch of pictures exuding a kind of cathartic exhale, a “huge, happy, light-headed relief,” as Warner puts it. Baker’s favorite drawing is from Day 771, titled “The Daily Flow of Consciousness,” which she believes represents her current state:

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What mother’s box of plums and sugar has to do with settling the age-old tension between science and religion.

Isaac Newton is one of the most remarkable, prolific, and influential cross-disciplinary scientists in human history. The Newton Project, one of these important digital humanities projects, catalogs the 4.2 million published and unpublished words by Newton, which are made available as interactive diplomatic transcriptions. Among them is this curious list of 48 sins 19-year-old Newton self-admittedly “committed” before Whitsunday:

BEFORE WHITSUNDAY 1662

Using the word (God) openly

Eating an apple at Thy house

Making a feather while on Thy day

Denying that I made it

Making a mousetrap on Thy day

Contriving of the chimes on Thy day

Squirting water on Thy day

Making pies on Sunday night

Swimming in a kimnel on Thy day

Putting a pin in Iohn Keys hat on Thy day to pick him

Carelessly hearing and committing many sermons

Refusing to go to the close at my mothers command

Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them

Wishing death and hoping it to some

Striking many

Having uncleane thoughts words and actions and dreamese

Stealing cherry cobs from Eduard Storer

Denying that I did so

Denying a crossbow to my mother and grandmother though I knew of it

Setting my heart on money learning pleasure more than Thee

A relapse

A relapse

A breaking again of my covenant renued in the Lords Supper

Punching my sister

Robbing my mothers box of plums and sugar

Calling Dorothy Rose a jade

Glutiny in my sickness

Peevishness with my mother

With my sister

Falling out with the servants

Divers commissions of alle my duties

Idle discourse on Thy day and at other times

Not turning nearer to Thee for my affections

Not living according to my belief

Not loving Thee for Thy self

Not loving Thee for Thy goodness to us

Not desiring Thy ordinances

Not long [longing] for Thee in [illegible]

Fearing man above Thee

Using unlawful means to bring us out of distresses

Caring for worldly things more than God

Not craving a blessing from God on our honest endeavors

Missing chapel

Beating Arthur Storer

Peevishness at Master Clarks for a piece of bread and butter

Striving to cheat with a brass halfe crowne

Twisting a cord on Sunday morning

Reading the history of the Christian champions on Sunday

Besides the list’s endearing earnestness — which brings to mind Woody Guthrie’s 1942 New Year’s resolution list — it also contains intriguing counter-evidence for the age-old tension between science vs. religion, standing in particularly stark contrast with modern scientists’ unabashedlynihilistic attitude towards “God.” And for those of us who prod organized religion with the rational stick of skepticism, it’s an intriguing perspective shift to consider that a groundbreaking scientists could also be a pious man.

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It’s no secret I have an obsession with little- known children’s books by famous authors of literature for grown-ups. Among them is The World Is Round by writer, poet and art collector Gertrude Stein, one of the most beloved — and quoted — luminaries of the early 20th century. Its story is an unlikely but wonderful one: In 1938, author Margaret Wise Brown of the freshly founded Young Scott Books became obsessed with convincing leading adult authors to try their hands at a children’s book. She sent letters to Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Gertrude Stein. Hemingway and Steinbeck expressed no interest, but Stein surprised Brown by saying she already had a near-complete children’s manuscript titled The World Is Round, and would be happy to have Young Scott bring it to life. Which they did, though not without drama.

Stein demanded that the pages be pink, the ink blue, and the artwork by illustrator Francis Rose. Young Scott were able to meet the first two demands despite the technical difficulties, but they didn’t want Rose to illustrate the book and asked Stein to instead choose from several Young Scott illustrators. Reluctantly, she settle don Clement Hurd, whose first illustrated book had appeared just that year. The book was at last published, featuring a mix of unpunctuated prose and poetry, with a single illustration for each chapter.

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